Spoiler for the lateral-thinking puzzle
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In the lawyerspeak of my country, the act would be deemed “an attempt upon an unsuitable object of crime” and would generally result in criminal liability. Because fundamentally the only difference between an “honest” murder and what actually transpired was the accidental error in knowledge on the part of the perpetrator.
It makes sense to me; Imagine a situation where the victim is e.g. fatally shot by an independently acting assailant a split second before someone drops an anvil on him. Why should either of the killers get entirely off the hook merely because of the random order of events?
